How The Story Ends Or Have We Just Begun
by fangirlgonewild
Summary: Spoilers to 4.26 The End in The Beginning. Two sides of a simple exchange. Rating for language only a little .
1. Brennan

[Brennan]

She loses the battle with herself slowly, as the days turn into weeks. Booth no longer looks at her with blank eyes, but what he has filled them with is not Booth, but an endless litany of memorized facts. Sometimes she can hear him muttering under his breath—_Jack Hodgins…bugs and slime…thing for Angela_—and she winces inside, wondering what he has learned by rote about her.

Brennan wants to be strong for Angela, who needs to believe that Booth will one day wake up and remember, all at once. That he will walk back in and just _know_. Brennan knows better than to hope for this. Statistically, she wants to note, amnesiacs recover over time—and information not remembered soon after the incident is likely lost for good, but she holds her tongue.

Sweets reminds her that if the situation were reversed, Booth would be there for her—with pie (about which he would probably lie, and say she loved) and strength and patience. Brennan does note that Sweets has no idea what Booth would do because it is what it is, and human emotional responses are unpredictable.

But she does know what Booth would do, and she tries to do it, to emulate his un-given example. She knocks on his door, ignoring her irritation at the not-quite-the-same smile as she holds up the Thai. She does not flinch when he greets her with, "Dr. B, come on in…" She inserts names and explanations into her anecdotes, taking care to overload him with too many facts, too many specifics.

Brennan feels herself slipping as the initial spark of illogical hope slowly extinguishes itself under the crushing weight of reality. She cannot convey the nuances of her experiences with Booth to herself, let alone explain it to him. And more frightening to her is that she, too, is starting to forget.

Details begin to go awry—did he tell her that _everything happens eventually_ at the diner? Or standing over a body? Or neither? Or never? Booth appears at her side on the platform and she struggles to think if he always stood that way, leaning on the railing just so.

So, Brennan sits at her desk, staring at a half-blank document on her computer screen, wondering if the definition of a human could be more than chemical building blocks arranged in repeating patterns. Booth is one person, of this she is sure, but now he feels like two—the old one that she knew she liked (loved), and the new one that she feels so unsteady around. She pictures the two Booths on opposite ends of a chasm, and it seems like there are thousands of meters between them.

"Bones," she reacts automatically as his voice interrupts her thoughts, turning toward the man standing awkwardly in her doorway.

"We caught a case," says, by way of explanation, and as she stands to gather her coat, she smiles.


	2. Booth

[Booth]

Booth's mind is not a blank slate, more like an unfinished map he must use to navigate his world. He fills in the blanks as he goes, but miles of uncharted territory lie ahead, and he finds himself tiring under the strain.

He is highly aware of himself at all times, on alert for the whisper of memory, constantly pushing himself to remember his relationship to the people and things that surround him. Sweets (psychologist…FBI…juvenile) tells him not to stress himself, what he will know of his former self will come in time. Booth's instincts scream _bullshit_, and he feels rather than knows that he would never have believed this crap. Or would he?

He trusts his gut with reservation, guessing and second-guessing himself until his head aches. Booth thinks that she could probably tell him what he thinks of psychology, but it's like having a punchline explained (and he's ashamed to ask, anyway). It's because of her that he does not trust these feelings wholeheartedly. She leaned in with worried eyes and told him that he'd reacted poorly to anesthesia and he thought _Dear God, I've forgotten my wife's name_. But Dr. Brennan is neither wife nor girlfriend—a partner, she had told him, a friend.

Yet she sticks in Booth's head like a pop song. He feels like he once knew all the words, but now he can only sing along to the chorus, like everyone else. Dr. Brennan (forensic anthropologist…Jeffersonian Institute…mystery) fascinates him. She is beautiful, to be sure, but he also vaguely recalls her crouching over a body and complaining it had too much flesh. She is strange, working with the bones, her long and delicate fingers dancing over the steel lab tables, arranging and rearranging. His partner has more focus than anyone he's ever met (he thinks, maybe).

There is something that he cannot put his finger on about her, about them. She continues to show up at his door uninvited. And it seems like a habit gone wrong somehow, a not-quite-normal turn of events. He's always on the verge of breaking through and watching everything fall into place, but he can't quite make it happen.

Sometimes he recognizes things because he's supposed to. Faces, places, names—he responds as he thinks he should to put people at ease. Booth thinks he's gotten pretty good pretending, at giving people what they need from him. He wraps himself in a mask of this other Booth and fakes it. Dr. Brennan notices, he is certain of that. She doesn't miss a thing, and there are some things he does not know how to falsify.

The wrongness of her name, for one, is so large and so bothersome that sometimes he wants to call her "hey, you." Dr. Temperance Brennan, she introduced herself, but it weighs heavily on his lips, sounding clunky and foreign. The look on Sweets' face when Booth addressed her for the first time confirmed his suspicion—this is not her name, at least, not for him. He tries endless combinations of nicknames; she responds to each with the same seeming nonchalance, without comment or complaint. Though, as the weeks drag on, Booth notices a sadness growing in her, filling the air around her with silence. He wants to shout_ I'm here_ and _I'm trying_ but does not know what to say or how to say it.

Booth ambles to her office, file in hand, stopping just shy of the doorframe. She's staring at her computer screen, and he wonders if this is her writing process, if that half-full page is becoming another book in the recesses of her mind. He discovered her author status at Barnes and Noble in the prior week, and she had laughed at his look of surprise when he asked her about it. _Most of the world knows me as an author, Booth_. But he didn't. It just didn't sit well with his image of her—he could not see her pouring over words with the same intensity that she did when examining the skeletons, the bones. His image of her is more correct, so firmly entrenched in his mind's eye that he _knows_ it to be fact.

"Bones," he says, surprising himself as the name slides off his tongue, "We caught a case."

And it feels so perfect, so right when she smiles and stands to come with him.


End file.
